From Health Systems to Systems for Health
Health leadership is entering a new operating era in which human health, animal health, environmental health, climate, biodiversity, food systems, water, cities, prevention, and social resilience increasingly need to be managed as one connected agenda. At the Global Health and Purpose Summit, as part of People and Planet United, Benoît Miribel, President of the One Sustainable Health Foundation, joins host Christina Raish, VP, Chief of Staff at FINN Partners, for a leadership conversation on “One Sustainable Health for All: Rethinking Models in an Era of Global Crisis.”
Christina Raish opens the conversation by placing One Sustainable Health within the broader transformation now taking shape across health, sustainability, and development. Her framing is clear and timely. Human, animal, and environmental health form an interdependent continuum, and the work ahead requires collaboration among public institutions, private actors, civil society, scientific experts, foundations, cities, companies, and citizens. Benoît Miribel builds on that premise by showing how the One Sustainable Health movement has evolved from pandemic-era reflection into an international platform for recommendations, advocacy, project acceleration, and operational collaboration.
Miribel’s central argument is both practical and strategic. The world already has strong scientific evidence that health outcomes are connected to climate, biodiversity, food systems, pollution, water, architecture, land use, social systems, and economic choices. The next stage of leadership therefore depends on implementation. One Sustainable Health becomes powerful when it moves from shared understanding to coordinated action, from expert dialogue to financed projects, and from health systems alone to wider systems for health.
Health as an Interdependent Continuum
Raish establishes the leadership context by describing One Sustainable Health as an approach that responds to the connected nature of today’s health realities. Health outcomes are shaped by climate dynamics, environmental quality, social conditions, economic systems, animal health, and the wider living world. This framing gives the session its significance because it positions health as a shared outcome produced by many systems working together.
That statement sets the direction for the full conversation. One Sustainable Health is presented as a practical leadership model that helps institutions move from vision to action, open collaboration across sectors, and bring public, private, scientific, and civic actors into a shared operating framework. Miribel’s experience across humanitarian action, global health, development, and foundation leadership gives the discussion a strong implementation focus.
Today, we will explore how to move from vision to action by breaking down approaches and strengthening collaboration between public institutions, private organizations, and civil society.
— Christina Raish, FINN Partners (translated from French)From Pandemic Reflection to International Forum
The One Sustainable Health Forum emerged in 2020, during the pandemic, from informal exchanges among professionals connected across several continents. Miribel describes a period of reflection in which experts recognized that many institutions were working through separate disciplines while facing problems that required integrated responses. The insight was simple but consequential. A new space was needed to connect expertise, structure the discussion, and help translate shared understanding into recommendations and action.
The Foundation for One Sustainable Health for All was then created to support that forum. Hosted by the Institut Pasteur, the foundation supports international working groups, events, recommendations, good-practice sharing, and advocacy with public authorities. Over five years, this structure has grown into a platform that brings together experts, organizations, foundations, public and private actors, and civil society around a common goal.
The forum’s visibility has also moved into high-level public engagement. Miribel explains that President Emmanuel Macron formally encouraged the work of the forum and that a presidential One Health Summit later took place in Lyon on April 7, with more than 50 international delegations. Around that event, the forum contributed to civil society engagement, scientific sessions, business-focused conversations, city and local-government discussions, and the development of the OSH Factory as a project-oriented vehicle.
A Broader Model for a Connected Living World
Miribel places One Sustainable Health in continuity with traditional One Health while expanding its field of application. Traditional One Health has long connected human and animal health, especially in infectious disease and antimicrobial resistance. That foundation remains essential. The One Sustainable Health approach adds climate, environment, biodiversity, food systems, pollution, social vulnerability, and the Sustainable Development Goals to the operating frame.
This expansion changes the work of health leadership. Food production and consumption influence human health. Soil, microbiome, and diet connect agricultural systems to disease prevention. Architecture, urban heat, air flow, and building design shape the health of cities. Water contamination and chemical pollution require diagnosis, technology, regulation, and transition planning. The point is to help institutions see these relationships as part of one coherent field of action.
What we wanted was to connect One Health to the environment, climate, biodiversity, and even food systems.
— Benoît Miribel, One Sustainable Health Foundation (translated from French)Raish recognizes this as a meaningful broadening of the agenda, one that integrates the major issues of the living world into a single leadership conversation. The session therefore advances a model that is scientific, institutional, and operational at the same time.
A Foundation Built for Dialogue and Projects
The Foundation for One Sustainable Health for All is built around a clear mission, which is to increase dialogue and innovative projects between public and private actors in support of sustainable health for all. Miribel describes the foundation as a partnership structure, hosted at the Institut Pasteur and supported by partner foundations. Its purpose is to create more fluid collaboration among public authorities, companies, associations, academic experts, foundations, field actors, and citizens.
The mission is to increase dialogue and innovative projects between public and private actors in favor of sustainable health for all.
— Benoît Miribel, One Sustainable Health Foundation (translated from French)The forum it supports includes international working groups and approximately 200 member organizations. Its method reflects a careful governance choice. Experts contribute in the name of their expertise rather than as formal representatives of their institutions. Recommendations are then shared with member organizations, which may endorse them. This structure creates a space for rigorous, transdisciplinary work while giving institutions a practical way to engage with the results.
People in the working groups speak in the name of their expertise, not in the name of their organization.
— Benoît Miribel, One Sustainable Health Foundation (translated from French)The model also explains why the forum has gained public attention. Serious recommendations, broad participation, and transdisciplinary legitimacy create a bridge between expert knowledge and public decision making. Miribel presents this as a practical form of advocacy rooted in science, field experience, and institutional collaboration.
From Recommendations to Operational Action
Implementation is the decisive next step. Miribel describes the OSH Factory as a mechanism for moving from recommendations to projects. In Lyon, more than 80 transdisciplinary projects were presented, with financial partners including the World Bank, private partners, and foundations. The aim is to connect projects with expertise, financing, local contexts, and operational pathways.
The project examples show the breadth of the One Sustainable Health agenda. In African contexts, rising waters and climate exposure call for prevention, resilience, and local capacity. In architecture and urban planning, air flow, light, heat, and building design influence human health. In food systems, the connection between soil, microbiome, and human health demonstrates that agricultural and dietary models belong inside health strategy. In antimicrobial resistance, pesticide and antibiotic use require coordinated attention across human, animal, environmental, and regulatory systems.
The leadership implication is direct. One Sustainable Health gains force when projects are practical, financed, locally adapted, and connected to the institutions capable of scaling them. Knowledge becomes more valuable when it moves into implementation.
Collaboration as Shared Ownership
Raish turns the conversation toward the relationship between public and private actors, and Miribel responds with one of the session’s clearest management principles. Effective collaboration begins with shared awareness that each sector holds part of the solution. Public authorities bring legitimacy, policy, and coordination. Private actors bring innovation, operational capacity, and resources. Civil society and citizens help define priorities and give social direction to the choices being made.
Everyone has part of the solution, but no one can do it alone.
— Benoît Miribel, One Sustainable Health Foundation (translated from French)Miribel distinguishes this kind of collaboration from basic subcontracting. The more advanced model requires concertation, shared ownership of issues, and a collective understanding of the society being built. That distinction is especially important for companies and foundations. Innovation has a role to play, but the finality of innovation matters. Leaders need to ask what is being produced, for what purpose, and with what consequences for health, living systems, and future generations.
Human, animal, and environmental health form an interdependent continuum.
— Christina Raish, FINN Partners (translated from French)This makes One Sustainable Health a business leadership issue as well as a public health issue. It asks organizations to participate in prevention, transition, and resilience with a clear view of social purpose and long-term value.
Prevention, Transitions, and Public Understanding
Prevention is one of Miribel’s strongest themes. He emphasizes that societies understand the cost of crises once they occur, while the value of prevention requires earlier investment, broader public understanding, and stronger communication. The pandemic, climate shocks, food system disruptions, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and future infectious risks all reinforce the same lesson. Prevention is an investment discipline and a governance discipline.
We work on prevention, understanding, and transitions.
— Benoît Miribel, One Sustainable Health Foundation (translated from French)Transition is equally important. Ambitious commitments need practical accompaniment for the people and sectors affected by change. Miribel cites the European Green Deal and the response of farmers as an example of the need to support transition with understanding, dialogue, and workable pathways. The point is positive and practical. Sustainable progress depends on helping people move with the change rather than simply announcing the destination.
Raish connects this to public health culture, especially the tendency of medical systems to treat consequences while education about prevention remains underdeveloped. Miribel extends that point to schools, media, public events, and citizen engagement. People need accessible ways to understand how health connects to the environment, food systems, climate, water, and daily life.
Toward Systems for Health
The most important leadership formulation in the session comes near the end, when Miribel shifts the language from health systems to systems for health. Health systems remain essential, but the determinants of health extend across the economy, society, climate, ecosystems, food systems, water, buildings, education, and local environments. A future-ready model therefore connects medical care with the broader conditions that allow people and communities to thrive.
We need to talk about systems for health rather than only health systems.
— Benoît Miribel, One Sustainable Health Foundation (translated from French)Looking ahead, Miribel describes the next five years as a period for accelerating operational practice. The foundation and forum intend to multiply OSH Factory actions, develop a digital platform to share and accelerate projects across countries, connect initiatives with public and private financing, and deepen prevention and implementation work. Scientific understanding has reached a sufficient level of maturity for practice to accelerate.
Raish closes by identifying One Sustainable Health as an operational necessity for an era of interconnected crises. Miribel’s final thought captures the spirit of the session in a concise and memorable way.
No one is One Health. We are One Health only together.
— Benoît Miribel, One Sustainable Health Foundation (translated from French)One Sustainable Health for All presents a clear agenda for leaders across sectors. Health strategy gains strength when it connects prevention with innovation, scientific evidence with civic understanding, public authority with private capability, and human wellbeing with the living systems that sustain it. The path forward is collaborative, operational, and ambitious in the best sense of the word. It invites institutions to build systems for health that are more resilient, more inclusive, and more aligned with the realities of a connected world.
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